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The seventh edition of the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) took place from June 28 to July 2 2017.[1] This conference is organized every two years by an African Studies Centre that is a member of the Research Network of African Studies Centres in Europe (AEGIS). By bringing together so many Africanists in one place, AEGIS hopes to improve, deepen and facilitate knowledge exchanges between Africanists; and the conference definitely accomplished this! A whopping 1600 Africanists traveled to Basel, a beautiful city in Switzerland, where the Centre for African Studies Basel and the Swiss Society for African Studies warmly welcomed us. Continue reading →

Education for Life in Africa – a title like that inevitably leads to a number of questions. Do we know what kind of life the African youngster of today can look forward to? What is the place of African education in a globalizing world? Does ‘one size fit all’, or do we need different types of education? All these and more questions were tackled in the information-filled conference of the Netherlands Association of African Studies (NVAS), on 19 and 20 May in the beautiful facilities of the The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Continue reading →

Tracing the rise and development of the Ghanaian video film industry between 1985 and 2010, Sensational Movies examines video movies as seismographic devices recording a culture and society in turmoil. This book captures the dynamic process of popular filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination and tracks the interlacing of the medium’s technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Christianity on the other.

On Saturday 17 October the NVAS Africa and Technology day was held at UNESCO-IHE in Delft. More than 100 participants attended this highly informative, but pleasantly informal, day full of various presentations on the meaning and use of technology in Africa and exhibitions of technological objects used in Africa.

The first keynote speech was given by Jeroen van der Sommen, from AKVO, a not-for-profit foundation that creates open source, internet and mobile software and sensors. He offered a good introduction to what the opportunities of ICTs in Africa are – detailing about how one can monitor water levels in boreholes in Liberia by using a mobile phone, and how this information can subsequently be shared through open source software to generate information databases which can make development planning more efficient and effective. After that, there were four parallel sessions on various topics, by Katrien Pype on technology cultures in urban DR Congo; by Sjaak van der Geest on medical anthropology; by Roos Keja on mobile phones and civic participation in Togo; and by Tessa Pijnaker on game developers in Ghana.

On the 29th of July Stephen Ellis, an NVAS member and highly esteemed scholar, sadly passed away. Ineke van Kessel, who is also an NVAS member, shared her personal memories.

“I first met Stephen Ellis in 1990 in Johannesburg. I had just embarked on my research for my Ph D on the United Democratic Front and the turbulent decade of the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s; he was about to become the director of the African Studies Centre in Leiden, and thus my boss. To my pleasant surprise, we immediately plunged in a lively discussion of my preliminary research findings and shared some gossip. My interlocutor was obviously very knowledgeable and well-connected, but utterly unpretentious. After my fairly brutal initiation into the claustrophobic world of academia, which I had entered in 1988 after a career in journalism, I had come to expect a huge social distance between an accomplished academic, about to become director of a research institute, and a junior researcher. Stephen Ellis however did not seem enthralled by hierarchies of power, position and patronage; he was genuinely interested in the contents of my research. With huge relief, I concluded that, after all, it must be possible: exchanging views and information on the basis of a shared passionate interest in Africa, regardless of rigid academic hierarchies. Continue reading →